Trump Administration Resurrects Protection of Conscience Rights and Religious Freedom in HHS Office for Civil Rights Reorganization

The Trump administration is receiving praise this week after its announcement Monday of the restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the department’s agency tasked with enforcing laws that protect civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy.

Image: HHS on X

“This reorganization restores the HHS Civil Rights Division and the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division and strengthens the Office for Civil Rights’ ability to defend religious liberty, enforce conscience protections, and combat unlawful discrimination,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, HHS will defend these rights with clarity, accountability, and resolve.”

Former Director of HHS OCR Roger Severino noted that, in 2018, the first Trump administration “launched the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division to help victims of discrimination and vindicate conscience rights.”

Self-professed Catholic Joe Biden, however, “tried his best to kill it,” he said.

“Our biggest case was a $200 million Medicaid disallowance against California for forcing nuns to buy abortion insurance for fellow nuns, contrary to their sincere faith convictions,” Severino recalled.

Screenshot: X

As HHS reported in its announcement, Trump’s original landmark Conscience and Religious Freedom Division (CRFD) of OCR was ultimately “de-emphasized” and, then, “dissolved” by the Biden administration.

“The new structure will improve OCR’s effectiveness and efficiency to advance the protection of conscience rights, address race-based discrimination in a color-blind manner, eradicate antisemitism and anti-Christian bias, and restore biological truth,” HHS asserted.

Paula M. Stannard, director of the HHS OCR, added that the reorganization of the agency will serve to revive “a structure that rightly prioritizes civil rights and conscience and religious freedom alongside health information privacy and security.”

The move by the Trump administration is one that is significant “not because of its symbolism, but because of what it makes possible: the actual enforcement of rights that existed only on paper during the Biden administration,” commented Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project and recipient of the Religious Freedom Institute’s 2025 Religious Freedom Impact Award.

Picciotti-Bayer wrote Wednesday at the Christian Post of the sharp contrast between the Biden and Trump administrations in the area of religious freedom protections.

“For the better part of the Biden administration, the administrative state was not neutral,” she observed. “It was weaponized against religious Americans. That administration dissolved the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, folded conscience cases into a bureaucratic catch-all, and deprioritized the complaints of healthcare workers punished for their convictions.”

Indeed, while the nation’s laws did not change, the Biden administration made clear it would not enforce those guaranteeing religious and conscience protections, particularly in the areas of abortion and gender transition treatments.

“When every other protection fails — when an employer punishes a healthcare worker for their convictions, when a professional association looks the other way, when the culture labels those convictions as discrimination — the right of conscience is what remains,” Picciotti-Bayer observed. “It is the law that says: you may not be conscripted against your soul. The administrative state, which was so recently turned against that principle, must now be firmly put in its service.”

HHS invites those who believe their health information privacy or civil rights have been violated to file a complaint with OCR at https://www.hhs.gov/ocr/complaints/index.html.